PUBLISHED: June 23, 2017
Pasatiempo
Pasatiempo is the award-winning arts and culture magazine published by The New Mexican.
Witness for the persecution: “Art & Oppression”
Michael Abatemarco
The Presidio Modelo, a former Cuban prison that stands as a testament to human
oppression, followed the blueprint of a late-18th-century architectural design—
the panopticon. The circular, Coliseum-like model allowed for prisoners to be
observed from a central location without knowing if and when they were
being watched, thereby eliciting their obedience. This particular panopticon
prison, built in the 1920s under Cuban president-turned-dictator Gerardo
Machado, was designed so that inmates’ views of one another were blocked,
increasing their sense of isolation. The structure was photographed by Carl
Moore, whose stark images of the exterior and interior are included in Center’s
PhotoSummer exhibition, Art & Oppression, on view at the Marion Center for
Photographic Arts, at Santa Fe University of Art and Design. The Presidio looks
small enough to circumambulate in under 10 minutes, but it was built to house
up to 2,500 inmates, a number that, according to Moore’s statement, swelled to a
staggering 6,000 before it was shut down in 1967 after a series of hunger strikes
and riots. “I’ve always believed everybody should go to a prison at least for one
day in their life,” said exhibit co-curator and documentary photographer Tony
O’Brien, chair of the Marion Center.
The group exhibition is a juried selection of images that ranges from explicitly
political to more intimate, personal projects and touches on topics such as prison
tourism, uranium mining and the environment, surveillance, the suppression of
women and minorities, victims of civil wars, and refugee crises. In addition to
Moore, photographers include Francis Baker, Jane Szabo, Jerry Takigawa, Joan
Fitzsimmons, Kelly Eckel, Kerry Skarbakka, Lynne Buchanan, Manuel and Oscar
Gil, Marilyn Maxwell, Megan Jacobs, Patti Levey, Pilar Law, Tama Baldwin, and
Wes Bell.
Neighborhood Watch, a series of framed self-portraits by Kerry Skarbakka, opens
the exhibition. The images show the artist as a boy, as a young man, and finally in
middle age, depicting a persona or character that is more an invention of the
artist than a traditional self-portrait. As a boy, he’s full of bright optimism, with a
big smile. As a young soldier, he has the face of a stern youth out to prove
himself, and in the penultimate photo, his unkempt appearance and full beard
accompany a face hardened by disillusionment. The image looks like a mug shot.
“This is a new project, so it’s still somewhat of a work in progress,” said co-curator
Melanie McWhorter, programs and outreach manager at Center. “It’s still a concept
piece, so he’s still testing out a lot of these ideas. There’s these threads of male
actions, and they toy with the complexity of masculinity, too, in some ways.” The
photographs show a progression intended to reflect a common experience of
white male disenfranchisement, which leads the series’ protagonist on a road
from open to closed emotion. In the series’ final image, the barrel of a gun,
pointed directly at the viewer, renders the artist’s face featureless. It’s among
the first things you see when entering the space. “Everywhere you go, it’s
pointing right at you,” O’Brien said. “It’s so strange.”
For her still lifes, Jane Szabo takes objects from her family home and arranges
them as tableaux that reflect her relationship with her elderly parents, who
recently moved to an assisted-living facility. She made the series, Family Matters,
in response to her role as a daughter and caregiver, an instance where obligations
can take the form of oppression. One stark unadorned image from the series is a
shot of a pincushion, while another shows a diary under a pile of rocks. The objects
appear isolated, surrounded by nondescript black backgrounds, and the works
stir up thoughts about home, displacement, and memory.
Similar themes arise in Balancing Cultures, a series of images of photographer
Jerry Takigawa’s relatives, Japanese Americans who were sent to an internment
camp during World War II. Takigawa explores the culture of fear that led to their
detainment as well as the silence and shame that affected them when reintegrating
into society after the war.
Art and oppression is a compelling topic for photography, a medium that often
serves as a silent partner in surveilling others. Joan Fitzsimmons’ series Surveillance:
Warsaw is a voyeuristic body of work, which the artist shot through the peephole of
an apartment where she was living in Poland. She documents the comings and
goings of neighbors through the hole. Each image is a small circle surrounded by
darkness, showing the hall outside. The subjects, distorted by the curvature of the
door lens, feel removed from the viewer. The candid images, shot in an old building,
evoke the Cold War era of oppression. The theme of surveillance is also dealt with
in one of Kelly Eckel’s mixed-media Scratched Surface photographs: a surreal,
nightmarish image of a multitude of eyes in a disembodied head.
Wes Bell’s black-and-white prints deal with oppression and the environment—
trees that are fastened with cables and chains to keep them from encroaching on
landowners’ property. In some of the shots, the trees are wrapped so tightly that time
has caused the wood and bark to grow around the chains, which squeeze the trunks
like hourglasses.
Ashok Sinha’s series Portraits of Silence reminds us of the human cost of oppression
in the most poignant and visceral way. His subjects, victims of Sri Lanka’s civil war,
offer hope nevertheless, because of their resilience. They include a budding young
scientist who lost an arm and a leg in the war and children whose schoolrooms now
lie in ruins. Nearby, a series of photos by Pilar Law—of a razor-wire fence and a puffy
cloud in the sky beyond—leads the viewer on a journey from imprisonment to freedom,
or perhaps a dream of release. In the last shot, the razor wire has disappeared and the
blue sky remains, a sharp contrast to the barrel of Skarbakka’s gun.
